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Five Republican candidates for the US presidency tore into Donald Trump in a primetime debate in Florida on Wednesday as they tried to burnish their foreign policy credentials while sparring over the US relationship with Israel, Ukraine and China.
The former president, the undisputed frontrunner in a winnowing field of Republicans vying for the party’s nomination for the White House, skipped the debate to hold a campaign rally on the other side of Miami.
That did not stop several of the candidates on stage from attacking Trump and blaming him for the Republican party’s disappointing results in several closely watched off-year elections on Tuesday.
“He owes it to you to be on this stage and explain why he should get another chance,” said Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “He said Republicans, we’re going to get tired of winning. [After] what we saw last night, I’m sick of Republicans losing.”
Nikki Haley, who Trump nominated to be US ambassador to the UN, said: “I can tell you that I think he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now.”
“I’m upset about what happened last night,” biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said of Tuesday’s election results, but he directed his ire at the Republican National Committee rather than at Trump. “We’ve become a party of losers,” Ramaswamy said.
Wednesday night’s debate was the third primetime event organised by the RNC, following debates in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Simi Valley, California.
It was also the first time that the candidates shared a platform since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
All five vowed to support Israel’s right to defend itself, and had harsh words for Hamas.
DeSantis said that, as president, he would tell Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job once and for all with these butchers Hamas”. Haley said she would tell the Israel’s prime minister to “finish them”.
But Haley drew fire from Ramaswamy, who has adopted a more isolationist foreign policy agenda. The biotech entrepreneur called the former UN ambassador, the only woman in the debate, of being “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels”, in a reference to George W Bush’s hawkish vice-president.
Haley and Ramaswamy also traded barbs over whether the US should provide more aid to Ukraine. Ramaswamy, who has opposed more money for Kyiv, said the European country was “not a paragon of democracy” and appeared to call its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Nazi.
Haley said of Ramaswamy: “[Vladimir] Putin and Xi [Jinping] are salivating at the thought that someone like that could become president.”
She was backed up by Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who said supporting Ukraine was “the price we pay for being the leaders of the free world”.
The candidates also argued over the US relationship with China, including whether Congress should ban TikTok, the social media app.
Ramaswamy, who is the only candidate who uses the app, at one point went after Haley because her adult daughter has used it. The former UN ambassador replied, muttering: “You’re just scum.”
DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy and Christie were joined on the debate stage by South Carolina senator Tim Scott.
At one point, Scott, a social conservative, pressed his fellow candidates to endorse a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Republicans’ moves to limit access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade last year have led the party to disappointing results at the ballot box.
But Haley in particular refused to endorse the idea, saying it was unrealistic to expect that any future president would get enough votes in the US Senate to impose an abortion ban. “Let’s find consensus,” she said.
It was a smaller line-up than at previous debates after former vice-president Mike Pence dropped out of the race last month and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson failed to meet the RNC’s polling and donor requirements.
The event also marked the third time Trump avoided the debate stage. The former president and his allies say he does not need to participate in the debates given the scale of his lead in the polls.
Speaking to supporters at his rally in Hialeah, just north of Miami, Trump insisted “nobody” was “talking about” the Republican debate, and called his opponents “not watchable”.
The former president called on the “Republican establishment” to “stop wasting time and resources trying to push weak and ineffective Rinos [Republicans in name only] and Never Trumpers that nobody wants and nobody’s going to vote for”.
Trump remains the clear frontrunner in the race for the nomination, with polls putting DeSantis in a distant second followed by Haley in third place.
Trump has also been buoyed in recent weeks by several polls that show him beating US President Joe Biden in a hypothetical match-up.
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